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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Think that the idea of a "shared car" is still a marginal phenomenon not ready for prime time and appealing to only a few ragged Greens here and there? Check out this listing to see where you can pick up a shared car this morning and drive it off to wherever it is you need to go in more than one thousand cities worldwide. Not so ragged, eh?The listing that follows offers the latest cut of one that we have been compiling and continuously updating for some years in answer to the following simple question: "I woke up in the morning in XXX, and can I carshare here"? The list as it stands is pretty solid, but despite our great care we are aware that there are still places out there which we have yet to identify. But it's as good a start as you are likely to find anywhere.

So, you want to know where you can carshare this morning? Let's have a look at the one thousand cities where you can do just that this morning.

Oh dear. That's not quite one thousand, is it? Well, stay tuned. We are today putting this (2008) list before our 459 World Carshare colleagues, and I am sure that they will help us add to these numbers in no time flat. But that's nt really the point.

What we would really like you to do is to take a few minutes to check out if and how you can carshare in your community. Nothing there yet? Well let's work on it together. Write an email about that and address it to World Carshare at WorldCarShare@yahoogroups.com and you just may receive some useful counsel on what to do about it. (See map for incoming traffic on World Carshare this morning.)

In reviewing this long list prior to publication yesterday, Conrad Wagner of Mobility Systems in Switzerland and a long time carshare hand and an active international consultant in the field, made the point that our list as it stands is very curious to the extent that it includes both mega capitals like New York, Tokyo, London and Paris, and at the same time a host of very small communities. That's correct and in a future article we will dig into our records and organize by country at least.

But this brings up an important observation. More than half of these "cities" are pretty small places in the Netherlands and Switzerland, some with only a couple of hundred inhabitants. Which makes a very interesting point that seems often to escape even the carshare specialists. And that is that carsharing can work in a community of any size. And that's why we call it . . .

CarSharing: The last nail in the coffin of old mobility.

-- Carsharing – it is really carsharings since there are a wide range of ways of going about it – is part of a much broader approach to resolving the problems of climate and sustainable transport in cities and communities around the world. What are the rest? Well, you probably know a number of them but stay tuned. World Streets will not deceive.